CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: Book Launch & Reading with Ammiel Alcalay

Join Lost & Found and Litmus Press for an evening of reading, music, and conversation to celebrate and launch poet, translator, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay‘s highly-anticipated, monumental new book (Litmus Press, 2025). Alcalay will be introduced by Zohra Saed, followed by a musical introduction by Safira Berrada-Riggs on ‘oud and vocals.

CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books combines three of Ammiel Alcalay’s previously published poetic texts—Scrapmetal (2007), the cairo notebooks (1993), and from the warring factions (2002)—with a new work, “Controlled Demolition.” Unlike most writing categorized as “documentary” poetry, here the author and his process are constant reference points, serving as a prism to refract changes over time and circumstance in what becomes a mix of memoir, poetry, auto-critique, prose narrative, history, and investigative journalism by other means.

Books will be available at the reading, which will be followed by a reception. Free and open to all, this reading and book launch will take place in the Martin E. Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Please register to attend.

Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay’s latest books are CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books, his co-translation of Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, and the forthcoming Follow the Person: Archival Encounters. In 2017, he received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for his work as founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative; he is a Distinguished Professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

The notion of follow the person is a constant in Alcalay’s poetics. This auto-excavation of embodied cultural and literary lineages is a through-line in Alcalay’s oeuvre, and it grounds the four books gathered in this collection, which were borne out of real-life interactions with peoples and places. By grounding poetry’s materials and meanings in everyday life, Alcalay re-evaluates knowledge as such, what it is and what it can be, and sets the record straight on who can access and contribute to it.” —from the Introduction by Miriam Atkin and Marine Cornuet“Poetry, history and fiction come together so that they can, further down, be broken into parts, again, anew. I think Ammiel Alcalay is possessed by love, that haunting notion that more than any other notion, drives the human mind to madness, love as it is: sacred and perverted, profaned, humiliated, and resurgent, here and there, on different places of the planet, and here and there, on the pages of this book. There is in Alcalay’s work an unabashed tenderness for the world as it is, and that makes him courageous, different.”— Etel Adnan

“Ammiel Alcalay’s voice combines revolt and depth, and his poetics takes the reader to a new approach of literary commitment. His work goes beyond the classical concept of political commitment, in a way that makes from poetry an oasis and a source of discovering reality. Poetry and literature in the works of Alcalay are a road towards knowledge.”— Elias Khoury

“The Arabs defined poetry as “saying the unsayable” and here is a poet performing that eternal task. Alcalay distills truth and beauty in a “relentless turning of the prism.” This is a work of immense courage, “bringing back voice to the light” and posing painful questions. Pointing discursive daggers at the heart of state propaganda and controlled erasure. Here, too, is an elegy to the memory of all the victims of state terrorism and imperial hubris and horror everywhere, from lower Manhattan to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, always Palestine.”— Sinan Antoon

“This book forced me to redefine my life—this is the gift of from the warring factions. It’s no one page, no single breakthrough or juxtaposition, but Ammiel Alcalay’s way of bringing the intimate and the political into the single area where neither could be identified as itself is balanced by a profound understanding: that I, that perhaps all of us, have lived our lives in a war zone—that each struggle is no more or less than any other. That if the definition of a life: a woman’s, an artist’s, a warrior’s life, is possible—it is not in counting defeat or loss but in realizing what one has managed to hold onto. To pass on. There is no aspect of ourselves, of flesh and relatedness—however hidden—that is not marked, scarred & seared by this battle, the singular battle of this time. And yet we feel. We are not estranged from what we love & beauty as reason, as Source and goal—has not been obliterated from the battlefield.”— Diane di Prima

from the warring factions is a poem (or kind of poem) I’ve been waiting to read, its disjunctures not merely replicating social and ideological fractures but having an overarching take on those fractures, showing how pieces apparently unrelated actually mirror each other, for all the differences involved… It seems to me that poetry has to do its work by “any means necessary”—and possible—and I’m tired of dogmatic assumptions about what is possible, in poetry as elsewhere. We need both narrative and disruption, revolution and continuity.— Adrienne Rich

This event is presented by Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, along with our friends at Litmus Press.

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